Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

Eric Olson has made an important addition to the discussion started by Parfit of the argument from the possibility of fission to the unimportance of personal identity. Olson’s discussion is challenging. I want, more briefly, to highlight what is the most important consequence of it. This is that it is metaphysically impossible, impossible in the strongest sense, that any version of Parfit’s argument from fission can yield his conclusion. Olson argues specifically that this is impossible if what he calls a ‘capacious ontology’ is assumed. I argue that it is…

In a recent paper, Olson (2019) returned to Parfit’s argument from the possibility of fission to the unimportance of identity to claim that it is inconsistent with Parfit’s ontological commitments. Picking up Olson’s claim, Noonan (2024) argues that one consequence of this is that Parfit’s argument necessarily fails to yield its conclusion. Here I show that Noonan’s ontological stance is similar to Parfit's in one significant sense, thus diminishing the scope of his claim. As a result, I hold that if we want to defend that personal identity is what…

People in moods usually claim that they feel in a certain way, and yet they also say that moods are undirected states. If one takes these reports at face value, moods are a counterexample to representationalism, namely the doctrine of a necessary connection between phenomenal character and content. The standard representationalist answer is to deny moods’ undirectedness in order to capture the phenomenal character of moods. I go in the opposite direction: I will deny moods’ phenomenal character and secure moods’ undirectedness instead. I will show that both our folk-psychological…